Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5629621" data-attributes="member: 82106">But I think in the case of 4e the situation is a bit different. 4e is fundamentally a fairly simple RPG. You have stats, defenses, skills, and powers, and a d20 mechanic, and then you have various general combat rules (action system, LoS/LoE, etc). Then there are a few other rules (a few exploration rules, more general cases of resolution, SCs, a few others). Where you have complexity and sheer scale is in the number of elements that use that core, and the way those elements can combine (which they can only do BECAUSE the core is uniform and simple).Contrast with 1e AD&D, which had a MORE complex core in many respects. Many things were not done in consistent ways, there were lots of strange fiddly combat rules that practically nobody ever understood, etc. It wasn't BIGGER than the 4e core, but it was certainly more complicated to use. OTOH in terms of game elements it was much smaller. There were never more than 10 classes, around 300 spells, nothing like feats, etc. AD&D actually has a surprisingly large number of rules, you can adjudicate MANY things in 1e that are simply not even mentioned in 4e. It wasn't that in 1e you had less to work with and had to intervene more, it was more like you had to apply lots of duct tape to 1e to keep all the parts working when things got outside of what was written. In 4e OTOH its d20 mechanic 'just works'. Hmmm, yeah, I think basically the thing is you cannot generalize about 'rules'. As Mike stated in his article there are different types of rules. Some are proscriptive, some are prescriptive, some are advisory, some are structural, and some are just ideas. Also it depends a lot on the type of system. In 4e you have a strong general resolution mechanic that is used uniformly, so you can attach many specific situational rules to that which are mostly prescriptive. You can have loads of them, and still have flexibility because you can just fall back to basic d20 mechanics whenever it makes sense. That isn't true of all systems.</blockquote>

Verification